Now Frank knew there was no need to tell me how to do the job. I already knew how. And he should have known that I would do it my way as soon as he was gone. His way was a long drawn-out bunch of foolishness, involving a lot of work. And that work would cost a poor man a lot of money which he didn't have. The man was a stranger to me but I knew he was poor, because he owned a Whippet. No man could own a Whippet very long and not be poor. So I did the job the easy way.
I unscrewed a small plug from the timing gear cover, stuck a screwdriver through the hole and jumped the sprockets back into proper timing. Then I screwed the plug back in and charged the man a dollar. When Frank returned, he was not at all happy with what I had done. He said, "That's not the way to time a car."
I said, "Maybe not, but it makes happy customers." And that's the one thing Frank needed a lot more of.
CHAPTER 15
GOT MARRIED, DROVE TRUCK, FARMED, CATTLE DRIVE
A year or two after I quite high school I got married. It was either in 1928 or 1929. The stock market crash came in one of those years and I got married in the other one. I keep getting them mixed up. I know we got married June the second, and I believe it was in 1928.
After our honeymoon Ima and I became sadly disappointed. Things were not as we had expected them to be. For years we had been courting and seeing a lot of movies. And every love story we ever saw ended by showing the couple getting married and living happily ever after. They didn't say one single word about the husband having to drive a truck six days a week, and sometimes on Sundays, nor the wife having to wash and iron and cook and keep house. Those were our big disappointments. We got married and had to work hard ever after.
After we married Ima and I lived in Hamlin in Papa's rent house west of the truck warehouse. I was driving a truck on a daily run to Abilene and back to Hamlin. That was when I learned that a truck driver could live on two meals a day. I didn't have time to eat three meals.
The rule of command, mentioned earlier, where the oldest in the group had authority over, and the responsibility for all the younger ones, proved to be a poor ruling after kids become men. So I began to drift way from doing any and all things whatsoever Earl told me to do. After all, I was a big boy now, even big enough to drive a truck to Abilene, which was twice as far away from Hamlin as Earl drove his truck. His regular run was only to Stamford.
At times I even hauled a lot more freight than Earl did. I had to deal with people he didn't even know and I had to conform to trucking methods which he had not been exposed to. Why, I saw trucks on U.S. Highway 80 headed for California with greater loads than Earl's truck and cargo combined. I saw those same trucks return with more miles added to their speedometers in one week than Earl might drive in ten weeks. I witnessed the advent of balloon tires on front wheels of large trucks and I saw them run as many miles as heavy duty, high pressure tires had been running on front wheels, and at half the cost—this before Earl realized that balloons were even being used on trucks.